Last month, Republicans were celebrating their midterm victories; Democrats were licking their electoral wounds; and President Barack Obama’s approval rating was stuck in the mid-’40s.

But after a five-week stretch that included bipartisan legislative achievements in the lame-duck session of Congress, mostly positive economic news and Obama’s well-received speech honoring the victims of the tragic shootings in Arizona, the political world has taken an abrupt turn in direction.

According to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, Obama’s approval rating has surged above 50 percent; confidence in the economy also has spiked; and the Democratic Party — but not the GOP — now enjoys a net-positive rating from the American public.

“The last six weeks have been the best six weeks the president has had in his first two years in office,” says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff.

…In the poll, Obama’s job-approval rating stands at 53 percent, which is an eight-point jump from last month and represents his highest rating in the survey since July 2009 … the improvement was across the board: Approval among independents moved from 35 percent in December to 46 percent now; among Democrats, it went from 76 percent to 86 percent; and among Republicans, it went from 11 percent to 15 percent.

….What is clear is that Obama will ride into his State of the Union address next week in a stronger position than many would have thought after November, when the Republican Party won control of the U.S. House and picked up seats in the U.S. Senate.

“This is a person who will walk in the hall with a great deal of confidence and with the wind at his back,” says Hart.

National Journal: As Pres. Obama returns from a Hawaiian vacation to a more Republican Washington Tuesday, his approval rating in the latest Gallup Daily tracking poll sits at its highest point in eight months.

Fully half of Americans approve of the job Obama is doing, while 42 percent disapprove. The last time Obama’s approval stood at 50 percent was for the three-day, rolling sample conducted last May 29 to June 1….

The jump in Obama’s approval rating comes shortly after a lame-duck session of Congress that Obama hailed as “a season of progress” before departing on his Christmas vacation.

Hmm, I wonder if the LA Times’ Andrew Malcolmfeels a little embarrassed now?

Malcolm: “Obama pays no attention to opinion polls, of course, because he’s so focused on the nation’s well-being. Which is probably another good thing because the president’s job approval has started down again. After all the pre-holiday hoopla over the “productive” lame-duck session of Congress that only added a trillion dollars to the national debt, the Democrat’s end-of-his-second-year approval rating has declined to 47% from 49%, with 46% disapproving of his job performance, according to Gallup.”

Meanwhile…..

Media Matters: We already noted that Andrew Breitbart blogger Dana Loesch posted the confused claim that the New York Times, among others, “underreported” the Tea Party story last year, when in fact the Times managed to publish more than 1,000 articles and columns mentioning the Tea Party in 2010.

Oops.

Well, look what else appeared on Loesch’s soggy list of stories the biased mainstream media have ignored: Obama’s sagging popularity

Obama supporter Rick Walker argues his point with anti-Obama Teabaggers at the Washington Monument (April 15, 2010). The group called ‘The Other 95%’ held a protest to counter the Tea Party protest that coincided with the day that American citizens are required to file their national income tax.